Vermont City Race Director: “Systems Are in Place for Runners’ Benefit’’

On a hot day in Burlington, Vermont, as wet bulb globe temperatures climbed to levels that experts say aren’t safe for exercise, race officials stopped the Vermont City Marathon. The race on May 29 had already been going for 3 hours and 58 minutes, and many runners did not comply with race officials’ instructions to leave the course.

In a telephone conversation with Runner’s World, Peter Delaney, the executive director of RunVermont, explains the measures the event took to protect runners from the conditions, how he made the decision to stop the race, and what he would have done differently. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Runner’s World: When did you start getting a sense that the forecast was not going to be in your favor, and what steps did you put in place as the week was going on?

Peter Delaney: I can say that everything went very well until we said, “OK, we have hit the threshold on the wet bulb thermometer.” And then life has become much more interesting.

We first started at looking at long-range forecasts a week out. We met with our medical team on Tuesday preceding the race [on Sunday, May 29]. We said, “We’re going to be hot.” We have to prepare.

As part of our emergency response plan, we already have what we refer to as the heat assistance plan. When we activate that, it means we add additional water to the aid stations. We add additional misting stations. New this year, we added five ice stations, putting the ice in feed troughs. People grab and go on the ice.

We put four roving ice patrols on the course that were golf carts, with 30-gallon buckets full of ice. They were assigned to different sectors of the course. We probably tripled the amount of ice on the course. Just with the golf carts, we put out two tons of ice.

We added capacity in our medical tent—staff, resources, and materials.

We did a community outreach to ask that our local community assist in hosing down our runners. That’s one of the more successful aspects of our program on an annual basis. Our local community is really quite participative and quite supportive. There were dozens of people [who helped].

RW: Were you offering to allow people to put off the race until next year?

PD: We didn’t offer a deferral.

We extended the time limit from six hours to six and a half hours. We looked at an earlier start, and deemed it would not have accomplished much. It would have given us a few less degrees of temperature; it would have gained us quite a few points on the humidity scale. We also couldn’t reassign the public safety resources for traffic control in such a short time frame.

We did quite a bit of messaging to runners to slow down, exercise common sense, obey race officials on the course.

RW: What happened when you called it?

PD: We used the emergency alert system developed by KSI, so that we were watching the wet bulb globe temperatures. That’s the Korey Stringer Institute, out of the University of Connecticut. It essentially has a scale of green, yellow, red, and black. It takes wet bulb globe thermometer readings and establishes those levels. At the highest level, which is black, extreme, if you exceed a reading of 82, you would be in an area where you would terminate the event.

We monitor the temperature at three locations on the course. And on Saturday, we spoke with folks at KSI to verify the process by which we would determine if we were finally in an extreme zone of the scale. We wanted to know if it was a single reading or if it was multiple readings. The process requires three consecutive readings over the threshold, over a 45-minute time period from at least two of the three monitoring stations.

At 3:58 into the race, that’s where we ended up. We terminated the event. We sent messages to the aid stations and the aid stations began to inform runners that the event was over.

Unfortunately we had inconsistent messaging, so runners were getting conflicting messages. We also used the RaceJoy app for runner tracking. Push messaging went out through Race Joy that the event was terminated.

We had a number of runners comply with the request to abandon the event and utilize shuttle services to return to the finish park. We had a lot more runners who said, “Thanks, but no thanks, we’re going to continue running.” That’s where we begin to run down a slippery slope.

RW: In the statement posted on your website, you wrote if the race is over, the course becomes open to public access. In other words, you can’t force runners off the road if they decide to keep running. What happened there?

PD: We chose to continue the timing services because that loads the RaceJoy app for runner tracking, and we thought having access to that information would create less havoc and panic for family and loved ones of runners still out on the course. And that then rendered results.

As runners decided not to stop and came through the finish area, they had a finish result. When we concluded we would have a cutoff time on the results, those outside the results are expecting we will honor their finish time. We are not going to proceed in that direction because they did not heed instructions from race officials to leave the course.

RW: So they might have had a result initially but you’re striking them from the results?

PD: That’s correct.

RW: And they’re not happy about that?

PD: That’s correct. It’s something that’s not an arbitrary decision on our part. We’ve talked to several different organizations in the industry. We’re going to stand by the practice. Runners need to understand that these systems are in place for their benefit, not to partake of when it feels like it works and ignore them when it feels like it doesn’t.

We actually had situations when runners who were ignoring warning signals could have put themselves in further jeopardy when we had to evacuate our finish park because of lightning warnings.

RW: Go back to the inconsistent messaging. What went wrong and what were they hearing?

PD: They were hearing things like, “There’s no more water on the course. The aid stations have been shut down. The finish line is closed.” All those kinds of things. Unfortunately none of that was accurate. Given the circumstances, we would never have pulled the aid stations. When it became evident people weren’t going to comply, the last thing we were going to do was pull the aid, putting people in greater jeopardy.

RW: Were volunteers just saying what they thought to be true out there?

PD: I think to a certain extent, and we certainly identified the need that we need to have very defined and well-scripted messages when we hit these circumstances, because we haven’t had this experience in past.

RW: How many people was it who kept running and will be taken from the results?

PD: We have about 930 people in the official results. We probably have about a third of the marathoners in the official results.

RW: Last year there were about 2,600 finishers. Did you you have roughly that many people start this year?

PD: Pretty close.

RW: How many people does the relay add?

PD: We have 1,000 two-person teams and add 850 three- to five-person teams.

RW: Were some of the relay runners still out there?

PD: Oh yeah. Basically we said to anyone who was running, if you cross 13.1, we’re going to give you a medal.

RW: Are you offering any discounts for next year?

PD: We’re not inclined to move in that direction at this point.

RW: How many recorded a finish that had to be stripped?

PD: So far all that’s been posted is the finishers within the 4:30.

RW: Of the remaining 1,670 marathon runners roughly, how many followed directions and how many did not?

PD: I would say that we don’t have a firm number on that at this point. All we have is anecdotal. The stories we’ve got, it was a lot. The number who complied was probably the minority.

RW: Are you frustrated about the running community’s response?

PD: I think I would express disappointment. I think that our entire team is just as disappointed. Runners train for 16 weeks, typically. Our production cycle for the race is 52 weeks. We put as much into it as the runners. Most of us are runners as well. We understand it. We get it.

In terms of producing a safe and responsible event, there’s got to be some parameters we can operate by and our runners will abide by. An awful lot of them did, and we appreciate that. But if, for instance, people had been running Boston and had ignored officials and run into a potential terrorist event, the outcomes would have been radically different.

RW: How many runners were hospitalized?

PD: We transported eight individuals to the hospital for further treatment. I’m not sure how many were seen in the medical tent. Four went to the hospital for exertional heat stroke. We had a cardiac issue, a diabetic issue, an unknown. Those numbers are fairly consistent with previous years. We were seeing them earlier in the event timeline than previous years.

RW: How long have you been the race director and does this make you want to continue with the job?

PD: This was my eighth race. It probably strengthens my resolve to do it again next year because you want to have a race you can take a great deal of satisfaction and enjoyment out of it.

RW: In addition to the heat, you had lightning warnings? That means you had to clear everyone out of the finish area as fast as possible?

PD: Yes, that is the case. The night before the race, we had a final meeting, we talked about how we would respond to two likely scenarios. One, we hit the threshold on the heat indices. Or we have a thunderstorm with lightning. We talked about those in depth and made sure everyone knew their assignments for such occurrences. I think we were prepared for either. We just didn’t expect we’re going to have to execute for both.

RW: Do you have any regrets? If you could have a do-over, would you change anything?

PD: I think we would have looked at additional relief efforts earlier in the course. We have one section that is an out and back on a divided highway that is quite exposed to sun. We got hit pretty hard on those aid stations and they went dry for 15 minutes before we could resupply. That was all because we didn’t have the ability to mist out there. People were dumping water on their heads.

There are obviously operational lessons that we have learned. There will be some that we pick up out of our after-action reports. I would say that there isn’t much I would have done differently in how we responded to this set of circumstances. I think we would have perhaps been different in the timing of some of our messages. We have to work on the sequencing of our messages.

Given the experience we had going into it, the framework of the plan was pretty good. It needs to be fine-tuned. My assessment of its effectiveness is it accomplished what we needed to have happen. As I always tell my team, our primary goal, no matter what, everybody should be able to go home at the end of the day.

Some of them don’t like us for what we’ve done or how we’ve handled it. As long as they’re going home, we’ve accomplished what we needed to do.

RW: You’ve heard from a lot of runners saying you did the right thing?

PD: We have certainly heard from a number of runners who appreciate the difficulty of the circumstances and supported the decision. We heard from those who don’t agree with that perspective.

Sarah Lorge ButlerSarah Lorge Butler is a writer and editor living in Eugene, Oregon, and her stories about the sport, its trends, and fascinating individuals have appeared in Runner’s World since 2005.

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